When does your week start?

Thursday, November 23, 2006

I remember when I was in the Navy, I had a chance to do a week internship at the Sheraton Hotel near the San Diego airport. Considering how our ship was doing work-ups for the upcoming deployment to the Persian Gulf region, it was an excellent opportunity to get out of some repetitive training on the ship. At the time, we would leave San Diego on Monday, cut figure 8's out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, do drills such as simulated "General Quarters". The ship's conditions had to change from the normal underway conditions to "battleship ready" in some ridiculous time of 5 minutes. Basically, you had to stop whatever it was you were doing and run to your battle station in the appropriate attire and close all of the hatches in order to meet the time. Imagine if you are in the head in the seated position.   If the conditions were not met, we would have to go through the same thing again. Then on Friday, we would return to port and spend either Saturday or Sunday doing 24-hour duty and then most of the other day doing laundry and other errons that couldn't be done since we were fooling around out in the middle of the ocean. Then on the following Monday, we did the same routine again. 

So, I got to go work at the hotel and got out of a week of "Bravo Sierra" training on the ship. While I'm working at the hotel, I see how these chefs, hotel managers and others go about their daily routine at this busy hotel. One guy shows me the schedule and has Wednesday in the place of where the Sunday goes and Friday in the place of where Wednesday goes. He explained that in the hospitality business that their weekends are when they are not busy which is Tuesday thru Thursday.

This past Tuesday, I was chit-chatting in Japanese with one of the teachers at the local university where I'm studying Japanese and she asked when I last went to Tokyo. I replied in Japanese, "This (week) Sunday." She had a puzzled look on her face and then said, "You mean Last (week) Sunday, right?" There we realized that in Japan, they consider that their week begins on Monday but in the US, we consider our first day of the week as Sunday. I then simplfied things by saying, "Ototoi deshita". (It was the day before yesterday.)

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